The good news is that the new combat model is everything I'd hoped it would be, so that is a big relief for me. There is still lots more interface polish that needs to go into it in the short term before it feels completely correct, but it's the sort of thing where all the solutions to me feel obvious rather than like stumpers. So that's a nice change of pace, heh.

On the release date, I've been kind of keeping that away from a big blog post and whatnot, because news outlets tend to pick those up and I'd rather have something positive like some new video or something they can show with it. I'll definitely update on that before too long, though.

you know considering how many times this games release dates been pushed I personally at this point would stop saying .its being released at such and such a time. and just set a deadline for its release when I would think it to actually be .finished.

That's kind of hard for an Arcen game. AI War's still seeing game changing patches, and Keith's apparently interested in doing more work on Bionic Dues (btw Keith if you ever read this that's SUPER cool of you ). Arcen's games hit release states, not complete states. If anything we should be glad that Chris is willing to kill his darlings to make the best game possible.

The good news is that the new combat model is everything I'd hoped it would be, so that is a big relief for me. There is still lots more interface polish that needs to go into it in the short term before it feels completely correct, but it's the sort of thing where all the solutions to me feel obvious rather than like stumpers. So that's a nice change of pace, heh.

On the release date, I've been kind of keeping that away from a big blog post and whatnot, because news outlets tend to pick those up and I'd rather have something positive like some new video or something they can show with it. I'll definitely update on that before too long, though.

Sure thing. I'll hold off for now. I won't have a free window for at least a week or two now, so this works for me too.

Is the new amount of time enough? I don't know the answer. I'd love to be the experienced designer/producer/project admin that just goes "oh yeah, that's totally enough, well done." It bothers me immensely that I can't do that.

I do not think this is possible. I've been estimating software development my whole professional live (not game development though) and the only reason I'm getting better at that is because of this. Funny that it is, I think this is the truth. I've never seen a miracle estimator in my life. I have not even seen a decent one. All I've seen are wild guesses that in most cases are hit or miss. You have the luxury of taking your time. In corporate software world in year 2015 it's a rare luxury. You are expected to provide fixed price upfront and then you'll be held up to it. Rare customer agrees to "time and material" which is paying for time actually spend creating software and I cannot blame them. So you put in a healthy margin, and you take a risk. That's the best one can do. Experience in your subject domain of course also helps.

So while I understand while this is bothersome - I know it is, I'm trying not to let it bother me because I do not believe that the ultimate solution to it exists.

To be honest, everytime I hear of a delay in this game, I get MORE excited for its release and become more determined to buy on release rather than wait for a steam sale like I do for 90% of more of my game purchases, even for games I am excited about. (FWIW, TLF was another that I bought on sight, and Bionic Dues would have been except that I missed it at release and ended up buying it at full price anyway as penance - and a Bionic Dues expansion, I'd probably buy 10 copies of at full price if it would convince you to make it... too bad I'd probably have to up that number a few orders of magnitude to have much effect...)

Honestly, I have plenty of games in the backlog, good ones even, way too many to get to in any reasonable time frame. But SBR is sounding like it will be amazing.

It's definitely coming along really well! We are ripping out guts like nobody's business at the moment, and replumbing them, but it's really a big step up. There's more interesting complexity for the player now, but less fiddly complexity. Some of the more daunting things we'll probably gate behind higher difficulty levels, which really will just be macros that you can use to customize your settings if you don't like our defaults.

Anyhow, I'm not a fan of what has been happening to the schedule of late, and we really can't afford another delay, but we've taken the ball from the earlier playtesters and run waaay downfield with it. So that's super exciting. Hopefully next week we can get them looking at it again with the new stuff, and then the next wave of beta players. Knock on wood!

Logged

Have ideas or bug reports for one of our games? Mantis for Suggestions and Bug Reports. Thanks for helping to make our games better!

but we've taken the ball from the earlier playtesters and run waaay downfield with it.

and built another stadium in Canada for it.

Logged

Note: This post contains content that is meant to be whimsical. Any belittlement or trivialization of complex issues is only intended to lighten the mood and does not reflect upon the merit of those positions.

but we've taken the ball from the earlier playtesters and run waaay downfield with it.

and built another stadium in Canada for it.

an underground launch facility to send it to the moon.

Mars

Logged

Quote from: keith.lamothe

Opened your save. My computer wept. Switched to the ST planet and ship icons filled my screen, so I zoomed out. Game told me that it _was_ totally zoomed out. You could seriously walk from one end of the inner grav well to the other without getting your feet cold.